FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[GAPPY & THE RED EYESORE]

Hmm, bit mixed on this one: I think it has a lot of potential and a nice variety in mechanics once you get into the later levels, but I feel like it really gives a bad first impression, doesn't quite reach its full potential and I wouldn't blame a lot of people dropping it very early, even myself (I only stuck around the whole way due to morbid curiosity and due to the Gappy brand).

When talking about bad first impressions, I'm not talking about the obvious bad first impression which is the eponymous 'red eyesore' graphics...though that is still a valid point that the graphics are both painful and quite boring/repetitive at times. I'm not necessarily referring to the bad impression that the controls can be as well, with certain aspects like walljumping being very much broken and frustrating to utilize.

No, when it comes to bad first impressions, I'm more talking about the levels and how long it took for them to get good. I can accept a Gappy game being a more standard platformer instead of an endless runner, but unlike a Gappy game, this did not grab me right from the start, and it took until around world 4-5 to give me any sort of challenge or spark of engagement in my brain, any of that classic 'Gappy' feel.

While all of the worlds introduce their own unique mechanic like rock form or reverse gravity or what-have-you and I do like that variety aspect, they all felt very token and underutilized and many of the early worlds end before doing anything interesting with them, or right when it was finally getting good. For example, the rock form can be used to break hard blocks, but so many of the levels just gave you rock powers right in front of hard rocks, making it feel practically pointless.

Even when you think it'd do something creative like make you go down an alternate path and get through some obstacles to come back with rock form, it just gives you a shortcut back instead of having you go back through the obstacles which now might have to be tackled in a new way due to your added weight from rock form: what a wasted opportunity! There are just so many instances of this where the level design is boring and challenge non-existent: as said, eventually it pulls some interesting tricks, but it takes until the way later worlds to do this instead of starting out strong.

At the end of the day, it was promising but quite clunky, but I guess you can take that as an achievement because, well, it's Gappy...on Virtual Boy! I mean, what else would you expect? It's very on-brand in its knock-off feel, I suppose, haha!

[Mr. Stretch and the Stolen Fortune DEMO]

Hmm, this was a bit of a mixed bag for me! I do feel like the game has a lot of promise and I want to love it: the whole stretching concept is kinda neat and reminds me of some of my classic favorites like Oil's Well, the game's presentation and polish is great and looks pretty cool, and the game did seem to be introducing a lot of new mechanics as the levels went on to keep things fresh.

But despite the game making a great first impression, it kind of fell flat for me, unfortunately, in a few different aspects.

*The controls of the game felt a bit frustrating at times: trying to make particular movements like sharp turns and such required getting used to the slight lag that the game had. The fact that retracting makes you completely lose control during the whole way back was a bit of a bummer too, as I would've loved being able to cancel halfway or something to pull off some slick moves.

*I felt like the retracting was way too slow: I don't mind it for during gameplay as that's part of the strategy, but I wish that retracting when you win a level or when you get hurt and so on would do it much faster: felt very boring to wait in those instances.

*Basic UI/Menus/etc were a bit awkward to traverse: it relies too much on buttons with unclear icons (would love if hovering over an icon would tell you what it does in words) and buttons can be placed in bad positions (you'd think the button to go to the next level after beating one would be big and placed in an obvious place like the lower center or lower right, but no, it's on the upper left, the last place I would think to look).

*Journals and tutorials and dialogue were way too wordy, in a tiny font, and filled with unnecessary details that just made my eyes glaze over. Recall the two magic phrases: "brevity is the soul of wit" and "a picture is worth a thousand words". I don't mind some optional lore for fun flavor on the side, but please reduce the words to the bare essentials when communicating mechanics, spread the words out over more pages/boxes to reduce density, and rely more on pictures overall. If you must keep your overindulgent word count, at least bold/highlight the important words so someone can get the gist at a glance.

*Level design and order felt outta whack at times with tons of weird difficulty spikes and difficulty valleys. For example, there was a really simple level with no obstacles after delivering several hard ghost-infested levels: felt really weird. The worst was the level that introduces crumbling blocks, which you'd think would start with a simple level to get you used to the concept of crumbling blocks, but no, it not only gives you crumbling blocks for the first time, but also conflates that with a really complicated layout that is incredibly boring to get through as you constantly need to wait for patrols to slip past, and you can screw yourself over if you crumble too many blocks to ruin your return trip: such a crazy difficulty spike outta nowhere!

*General design felt confused. On one hand, you've got levels that seem to reward you committing to a long stretch to get a high score point combo, and I found that a lot of fun to do while dodging obstacles and avoiding running into myself and such. But on the other hand, other levels don't allow you to stretch out due to an overabundance of ghosts and other obstacles which require you to stop-and-retract constantly, completely ruining any potential of combo scores in the first place. I can understand having some variety, but this just feels like it doesn't have a strong core identity.

Muketronics responds:

This is a demo, and it is the first game that we've made. Its still in it's drafting stages, especially when regarding dialog and journal entries.
We are working on improving controls, but its hard to find out exactly what makes them so difficult to use.

[Asgard's Fall]

Pretty nice little survivors-like! It's early in development, but I'd say you got a pretty solid foundation so far as I found the combat quite satisfying and addictive with how you'd setup the graphics, special effects, and impact/feedback for it, and I found the variety of weapons and enemies to fight to be very fun and interesting as well. Game overall has some pretty solid presentation for aspects like the title screen and menus and death animations too, so I like that attention has been made to aspects like these that are usually glossed over (though it'd be understandable if you left these for later on, but I like that you've done them as they help first impressions).

In terms of where to go from here, my feedback would be:

*While, as mentioned, the feel of combat itself is quite fun and exciting, the feel of progression aspects isn't quite up to snuff. Picking up currency is lacking that addictive 'ding-ding-ding' quality to it due to no sound effects and the currency itself being quite dull (I dunno what they even are, some sort of scrap metal?), and acquiring upgrades is lacking the fanfare that it deserves considering how important of an event it is (would love a more explosive level up effect, and picking an upgrade would be great if it played some sort of associated sound effect, like thunder for picking Thor abilities).

*Combat can get quite messy and chaotic and could use some elements to help visibility, particularly to help enemy ranged units and their bullets stick out more so getting hit by them wouldn't feel so sudden and unfair: perhaps a signal/telegraph for their attacks and outlining the units and their bullets would help them pop-up and have a consistent language to them.

*Could also use some other nice things, like a visible bar or cooldown timer for your dash, and perhaps making the upgrade progression bar bigger so increasing it is easier to see: the later levels come so slowly and it's made even worse but the small bar as it makes it look like you aren't even increasing it at all even more when the increments are so tiny.

*The rune upgrades are a little lame compared to weapon upgrades as they largely seem to be tiny statistical upgrades that are confusing and unexplained (what the heck is ignite chance, for instance?)

SmaexGames responds:

Thank you! That is some solid feedback, really appreciated. For the rune upgrades I'm working on a more simplified but powerful version. For example all the confusing increasement stats (increased ignite damae and so on) are now only available in the skill tree, properly explained. Also I think about adding icons for faster recognition. So you have simpler stats like flat damage, piercing chance, more projectiles and stuff like that.

[Amazing Monk]

Hmm, in terms of a student project game, it's decent: you kept the feature scope low so as to deliver a full game without falling into the usual trap of being too overambitious and never finishing, and while the gameplay design is simple, it can still provide an adequate amount of fun with its strategic jumping and dodging of obstacles that get progressively more complex. It's a good start with much to learn and create future projects from.

Viewing it without that student project context, however, the game is quite bog-standard and a bit boring, being very similar to thousands of other simple 'Flappy Bird'-esque games of its ilk. It's lacking any sort of hook or mechanic to make it significantly different in an interesting way (for example, the game could maybe provide a more interesting challenge if there were some sort of pressure that pushes you to go up faster, like lava coming up), and the game is a bit clunky and lacking both polish (in that there are elements like grappling onto the wall to slowly grind down that don't work consistently) and pizazz (in that there aren't many special effects to pep things up, and the special effects you do have, like the screen shake for every single jump, are nauseating due to their repetitiveness).

As said, it is quite boring in the grand scheme of things, but it's still an important step on the journey of game creation and perfectly fine for a student project: best of luck on future developments!

[Escape Burger World]

Decent little escape game! Nothing standout or mindblowing but it was a short and sweet little experience, and the art having this old-school flash style is amusing in how nostalgic it is. Not great, but not bad either: plainly ok, haha!

In terms of feedback:

*Found it confusing how they were clickable objects in the environment that didn't give any textual response: some were because they require an item to be used on them (in which case I'd love some hint text to appear if you click without the item on hand) and some weren't used at all for any purpose like the cash register or plaque, which was odd as it made them feel important when they weren't.

*I actually got stuck for a good portion of time because I didn't see the lower-right arrow in the behind-the-counter area to access a whole new area: you can blame this on me for being dumb because the arrow is there and I could've noticed it, but some part of me feels like the background art should allude more to there being an area there in the first place (like a door, or a gap that implies a hallway off to the side).

*The safe code at the end was a weird one to solve: there's a nearby paper which I thought was a hint that alludes to scheduling which made me think the code might be something to do with dates or employee ids or whatever, but instead the code was just on a random unrelated box in storage. Furthermore, the graphic for the safe code input makes it look like it's 5 digits, but you can put up to 8 digits in, and the solution is actually 6 digits, further adding to the confusion.

*Some minor glitches like the mouse hole overlapping the box which you can drag out, and the whole ice cream dispenser machine was some sort of pointless red herring which dispensed ice cream later on for no discernable reason?

[Grave Digger]

Argh, this is a rough one! Shows some solid potential for beat-em-up fun but has way too many rough, unpolished, clunky points to it as of now.

The game does show some solid fundamentals that could be used to build a great action roguelike akin to Curse of the Dead Gods or Cult of the Lamb and so on. For example, I liked how enemies showed lots of variety in their behaviors, displayed fair attack telegraphs, and could be satisfyingly stunned/interrupted with the player's attacks. I liked the weighty feel to the player's attack strings and being able to chop down parts of the environment. I liked how the game incentivizes you to not play cowardly by giving you powers as long you keep your combo up. There's a decent hack-and-slash engine within this!

Unfortunately, there were definitely loads of annoyances that brought this game down though. The incredibly harsh tilted angle of the playing field combined with the barely noticable shadows made perceiving objects very difficult, especially when combined with the very small screen size and zoomed-out camera. Coins were very annoying to pick up without any magnetism or hit box generosity. Damage feedback, especially from the little pink blob guys, could be incredibly confusing with them turning on a dime to hit you or even being able to hit you despite being knocked down. The combo text pop-ups took up way too much of the screen which hurt visibility, and the associated combo power-ups felt too random to be able to actively strategize. The movement of the character felt very clunky where they awkwardly keep moving despite letting go of the controls. And so on and so forth.

As said, while the bad far outweighs the good at the moment, I feel like there is a good engine buried in here and would love to see a post-jam polished version of it.

[Dinner For Mom!]

I definitely like the concept that this game is going for with its whole control-control Pikmin-esque or Tonight We Riot combat, and I do like the charming presentation and gross themes it plays with, but apart from the bare minimum I never quite felt like it introduced a unique hook, making the gameplay feel quite uninteresting.

Thoughout the game the combat just felt a bit brainless and tedious. I can understand that the civilians would be easy to take down, but once cops started to show up, I thought I would have to strategize in some way, like engaging carefully to single them out without alerting the others, micromanaging their movements to avoid taking damage, perhaps splitting them up to crowd-control, and so on, but it never got more complex than just sending all your people to dogpile them and the other cops would just stand around waiting for their beat-down.

The enemies never tried to attack me either so I didn't need to try and dodge while my minions wear them down or anything. The boss made some interesting moves like forcing my lumps to sleep which made me have to get close and engage to bring them back up, but it was too little too late as that was the end of the game and just a token effort of complexity. Other than that, there were the weapons like rocks, but I found it too annoying to have to order them to pick them up after use over and over, and the grenades were just a liability since I'm never sure when the grenade person will get ordered and he'll just blow all of my lumps up anyway.

I also just had a lot of weird bugs, like where a rock was forever un-pickupable because someone I told to pick it up died and he wouldn't give up the rights even after death, and for no reason I just suddenly insta-died at the start of the boss fight (and then felt weird that the game just gave me more lumps than I even had before, making the final tally/score pointless).

Obviously I understand that it's a game jam game so it's not going to be the most polished thing ever, but even with that understanding, I never felt like the minion controlling aspect did anything very unique or was something that felt good to utilize, so I don't feel like it's that intriguing as a prototype unfortunately. Certainly could be something nice with a bit more work: as I said it started to get a bit interesting with the boss fight mechanics, and I'd like to see if it evolves beyond that.

Sulfur-Cretin responds:

completely understandable, the game in general is very messy but due to it being a jam game, making updates can end up breaking the entire game. I do agree that the game only starts to get interesting near the end, but I'm glad that part was fun.

Also just to note about the game giving you a bunch of lumps after dying, when making a jam game you have to look through a very different lens when it comes to difficulty if you want people to see through your entire game. I made it so if you reached a check point early on with a ton of lumps (lets say 12) it will override any amount lower when you get to a check point. This made the game much easier and fair but I can understand if it was a bit strange, it could use some rebalancing.

Even though the game isn't the greatest, I'm still planning on making a content update in the coming weeks because it's had the best reception out of all my games so far, but I don't see it fixing the base mechanics of the game. Thanks for the review, I get REALLY nervous watching you playing all the front-paged games, but I appreciate you giving your honest and critical opinion.

[The Spin Slasher]

Hrmm, it shows some promise, but unfortunately due to its nature it begs comparison to games like Vampire Survivors and its many contemporaries, and in that respect it falls incredibly short for me, essentially feeling like some sort of bootleg Vampire Survivors clone that is bugged to never let you get another weapon to add to your arsenal.

As said, it does show some promise. In general, the concept/theme is interesting and the graphics and special effects are decently charming. The best part that stands out from other survivors-likes is that this has a nice variety of monsters with different attacks and properties, like the bats who stop-and-go, the slimes who split and leave behind puddles that slow you, the zombies who can crawl after sawing their legs off, and so on. In theory I think it could have some nice strategic combat.

The game, however, ends up feeling very bland and repetitive both from a moment-to-moment and a long-term progression viewpoint. The upgrades are incredibly unexciting as they never evolve your gameplay options in any way, being just bland statistical increments that are practically unnoticable. You don't necessarily have to be like other survivors-like where you have multiple weapons going off simultaneously, but the single weapon this game has, the chainsaw, is very boring and begs a more interesting control scheme, like being able to swing it around all physics-y like a ball-n-chain. Apart from the enemies changing, late gameplay felt practically the same as early gameplay making it feel so pointless.

Perhaps with a bit more of an interesting combat mechanic (like more control over the chainsaw) and more interesting progression/upgrades, this could be pretty cool, but for me, it currently feels a bit underbaked and doesn't have a nice hook yet.

[Train Journey]

Wow, quite surprised with this one!

I have to admit that my first impression of the game wasn't great. While the game had a rather professional feel for its presentation in terms of graphics and sound, the game seemed to be a rather unchallenging and standard platformer that felt rather directionless and confusing from the way it just plops you into the world. Even accepting it for what it is, I found myself constantly having my jump inputs ignored when I tried to jump from the edge of platforms, frustrating me to no end since falling is instant death, not just damage, and lots of progress was lost. The graphics, as nice as they were, could also be a bit overly busy to the point of confusion: there was a pitfall that was practically invisible between seats on the train in the section with the first heart upgrade you can get after the forest world, for example. The only thing keeping me going was the rather mysterious and intriguing feel the game had to it with its story (or lack thereof), but as I made my way through the forest picking through all these text logs and letters for unrelated stuff, I was worried it was just gonna be some sad artsy-fartsy crap, haha.

However, as I made it through the forest which slowly got more challenging and puzzle-like, had a rather impressive boss fight against a bear, marveled at how much the world was recontextualized with the pogo stick upgrade, and made my way through the bonus zone for a collectible, I was hooked and wanted to play more and more! It was a slow, rough start but I could finally see a glimpse of the gameplay loop and wanted to see what new worlds the train would take me too!

That said, the issue with not being able to leave the game and come back to a checkpoint, only the start of the level from a train, was incredibly annoying when it first happened to me as I Iost a lot of progress to the point of considering quitting the game altogether since it seemed incredibly illogical and annoying, no matter the excuse.

I haven't beaten it yet, but I'm looking forward to coming back and seeing what else the game as to offer: I just need to find a good amount of time to set aside for this due to the whole save point issue!

EDIT: I've now made it through the temple level and got the shooty and all that. It was definitely another grand adventure, but I will admit it was quite exhausting and stressful and not in the best way. Through a combination of cramped corridors, limited space, spongy enemies, and so on, the game just seemed to be overly forcing you to deal with these encounters and traps with no wiggle room, and it made it very tedious. Many times a pack of slimes would be in my way and the only safe way to engage would be to tediously lead them back several paces until you could kill them: this tedium led to me just wanting to push back them and take the damage just so I could keep the pace up, for example. Not only that, there were a lot of traps like with the rotating turrets that didn't even seem possible to get through without taking damage, and it almost seemed like the game just gives you health items around the trap as an inelegant apology for recognizing that it just couldn't be designed well enough to let you not take damage at all. I'll still try and continue, but like I said, these design choices are really weighing me down and making me lose the will to go on.

Meivuu responds:

Thanks for the review! I'm not terribly good at optimizing pico-8 (it limits how much content you can actually implement, akin to retro consoles) so many of your gripes stem from that :)

If this was another engine I would absolutely be able to make the quality of life changes that fix the things you complained about, but at this point those things are deeply baked into the game and I don't have enough space in the game to change that (some of them were choices intentionally made so that the game could have more content). If you're wondering why I chose such a limited engine, it's because I was already fairly familiar with it and the limitations helped me actually finish the project and prevented it from getting too out of hand.

I think the pitfalls and other minor graphics tweaks like that can absolutely be changed though and I'll add that to my list of changes for the next release.

Among other challenges, the turrets are certainly dodgeable, in some cases it's just a little tricky to figure out how to get past them without getting hurt.

[The Wizard Ran: chapter 8]

Wow, what an amazing ending to this series! Feels like it encapsulated all of my favorite parts of this series, being the crazy time-travelling fourth-wall breaking mind-bending adventures, tons of weird secrets and references and callbacks, crazy puzzles and setpieces like getting stuck in the void, multiple endings, and a classic good ol' boss fight against god filled with fantastic spectacle. There's been some ups and some downs on this adventure, and I wasn't as committed as I'd like to get every single secret and ending on our way here in previous chapters, but I feel quite satisfied and found this whole experience incredibly memorable. Well done!

In terms of feedback:

I gotta admit, I was a little disappointed that the whole time-traveling adventures through previous chapters to collect lore for the final plan(s) wasn't done by actually going and playing the previous chapter's respective games, but I appreciate the convenience and momentum by doing it all in this game, so it's all good.

Had a weird softlock for a bit: I was going to do Shade's plan as I had already done the Run plan, but then got stuck in the void. I got out of the Boid, but then whenever I tried to start Shade's plan by refreshing the page to go back to the start, it would just take me back to the void again, where I would get out, try to start Shade's quest by refreshing, and loop back into the void over and over. Eventually I got out: not even quite sure what I did differently to break the loop! I was trying out minor things like reading the lore things, trying to do the Ran ending again, talking to people, and a lot didn't seem to have an effect until it did. Oh well!

Speaking of Shade's plan, it was a bit weird that I was able to initiate the boss fight but I still had a remaining empty pip for the plan? Bit odd, though I did go back and see that getting the remaining pip in the first world (or last world, technically) just tells you its pointless since it's too late and warps you to the fight, so whatev.

Loved all the music remixes! I always forget to shout out music and sound in my reviews, need to get better at doing so, haha.

Speaking of sound, I wonder what's being said when you die in New Mexico you die in real life. The world may never know.

adriendittrick responds:

Thanks as usual for your detailed review :) there are still many bugs in this one but finding them all will take much time and I need to move on to other projects X)
This whole series was a great gamedev experience for me, and I loved all the community interactions I had :)